Calling All Agile Skeptics, The Curious, and Die-Hard non-Agile
Not convinced about Agile? Attending because you were sent? Do you feel like a fish out of water? Curious, but it just doesn’t make any sense at all? Does it feel like Agile goes against everything your experience tells you is the right thing to do? Convinced of some aspects but skeptical of others? This session will be a facilitated open forum to discuss your objections, doubts, counter-examples and horror-stories.
Also, if you are interested in helping to answer the objections, then bring your answers, conviction, and positive examples.
In either case, please bring an open mind, a sense of humor, and at least one anecdote. Participants will be expected to share the floor and help to keep the atmosphere fun and relaxed.
To focus the discussion, we will spend 5 minutes at the beginning to brainstorm on particular topics to discuss, rank them, and then start the discussion on the top topic. As that runs out of steam we will go to the next topic on the list and so on.
I enjoy facilitating discussions. I find that it is a great way (for all) to learn a lot about a topic very fast.
I talk to a wide variety of companies on a regular basis and mostly they are non-Agile, so most of the time I’m an Agile fish swimming in the shark-infested waters of traditional development thinking, and have a lot of experience managing the objections to Agile. I will spend a few minutes to use anecdotes from this experience to seed the discussion, but then move into a 100% facilitator role after that, encouraging members of the audience to provide good answers to thorny questions while keeping things light and fun.
I’m not sure of the best method at the moment, perhaps flip charts or a volunteer to take notes, but I will make sure there is a good recording of this session and write it up and make the write-up available. Perhaps other participants will volunteer to write-up their perspective on the results as well.